Photo Friday 18-8-10

This week the theme will be animals but posting other things is okay.
By Jukka A. Lång – 投稿者自身による作品, CC 表示 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14413311

One day there was a tall handsome foreigner giving a talk before a big picture window. In the middle of that amazing speech people started laughing. “Hmm, I have not said anything funny that I know of. Is there something wrong with my clothing? Well, I will act like nothing happened and finish up.” It wasn’t till later that said foreigner heard that behind him a tanuki had went from right to left in front of the window. The morale of the story is never compete with a tanuki.

I never would have guessed that Japan had raccoons. But then again I’ve never been there and I have no idea what sort of animals live there.

Raccoons are native to North America, but have become established in other regions after having been introduced, mostly as fur animals. Here is a map of their range.

[caption id="attachment_11102" align="aligncenter" width="609"] By Original: RokeDerivative work: Novil Ariandis [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], via Wikimedia Commons[/caption]Raccoons were introduced into Germany for fur about 80 years ago and quickly escaped and became established in the wild. They have been seen in Switzerland for around 35 years, including in the Jura of Western Switzerland where I live. I have never seen one myself, but I know people who have. Foxes are far more common—I last saw one a week ago crossing a road in mid-afternoon.